Conceptual engineering, science and art will come together tonight at the New Wight Gallery for the fall exhibition of this year’s class of Design | Media Arts graduate students, “One, Two, One, Two.”
From a high-tech skateboard bowl to an interactive movie viewing experience, this year’s works represent a fusion of technology with art in a variety of mixed-media pieces.
Art graduate student Jesse Chorng will be showing a work titled “The Syntheshredder,” an 18-foot-diameter skateboard bowl connected to an electronic program that works as an instrument as people skate on it. Chorng said he started the project around the same time last year and worked on the electronics over the summer.
“The topics I usually work in are subculture and identity formation, and the inspiration came from a way to translate the style and way of skateboarding into a different expression. I myself am not a skater or a musician, so my goal was for others to work together and collaborate on something else,” Chorng said.
The show features a mixture of sculptural, technological and interactive works, some of which the artists are still working on. Art graduate student Rexy Tseng, whose piece is an installation of movie scenes manipulated by computer software and sensors, used old movie seats bought from “The Muppets” movie. Tseng attached sensors to the seats so the viewer can affect the images on the projector and said he’ll probably be working on it up until the night of the show.
“I enjoy using technology because it’s another way of controlling new media and using it as a means of expression,” Tseng said. “Your experience is not in the traditional cinema sense but highly modified and controlled as it is being manipulated in real time.”
Some artists, such as art graduate student Noa Kaplan, are inspired by the things unseen. Kaplan’s work features sculptures of three scales of pollen and cancellous bone tissue, which she said she sculpted using a computer program.
“For this show, I’m focusing on sculptural work that is magnified, structures that we’re familiar with but don’t see at that level,” Kaplan said. “My inspiration is just general awareness of objects around us and an understanding of how we inhabit space in terms of scale.”
According to Chorng, unity became a deciding factor in naming the show “One, Two, One, Two,” since it represented their class of 2012 and the 12 students that were in the program, though one student dropped the program over the summer. Nonetheless, the group chose to stick with the name.
“Part of the name comes from “˜Alice in Wonderland.’ There was a quote in it that goes “˜one, two, one, two, through and through,'” Chorng said. “It’s like a preview show leading up to our MFA show in the spring, and it’s a reference to a mic check before a performance on stage.”
As the group gets ready to show together for the first time, Chorng said the group is nervous but excited.
“The chemistry of the class is really great and we get along really well and we help each other out,” Chorng said. “This is our first show as a class, so there’s a lot of anticipation leading up to it. The show’s going to be a surprise to all of us.”